


An Itch to Scratch

by delazeur



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Animal Transformation, Black Emporium Shenanigans, Cat Ears, Crack, Crazypants, F/M, Grinding, Kink Meme, Seriously just ridiculous, Seriously why does anyone shop there?, Sorry Not Sorry, Yeah that's right: Cat Ears, petting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-16 23:21:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1365463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delazeur/pseuds/delazeur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anders has been resisting Hawke for ages, but when she comes to him with a very specific and embarrassing problem, he has a harder time than he should.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Itch to Scratch

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! Have some serious nonsense with minimal angst and a Catgirl!Hawke. Yeah, I don't know either. 
> 
>  
> 
> Kinkmeme prompt: http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/11099.html?thread=43954523#t43954523
> 
> "Magical accident has Hawke growing cat ears and a tail. Anders just can't help himself.  
> Would LOVE for this to be pre-relationship (so when Anders is all about pushing Hawke away), but he just can't help himself because Hawke is so adorable.  
> Bonus points for ear kink and Hawke purring."

Maker, the woman was maddening. There was never a moment when she wasn’t there, looking at him, smiling ever so helpfully. The ways Anders pushed her away became ever more desperate and inventive. 

But she was so damn insistent with her teasing and Justice was so bloody recalcitrant. 

He was watching her as she sauntered (yes, the woman sauntered, of course she bloody did) between chest and cabinet in the Black Emporium. Her fingers flicked and lingered on objects that shrieked of immense arcane power but she would tip them aside with a wrinkle of her nose and a slight huff as if each brooch of protection or ring of lava were personally offending her. 

Anders leaned carefully against the railing next to Thaddeus and tried not to think about the urchin. None of this was fine, none of it was okay, but the way Hawke practically frolicked around the displays of artifacts forced him to be still. He might have ached to drag her away from the shelf of small figurines, but no, that was not his place, because _Justice_. He was present upon her sufferance, not there to protect her, to see her sound or safe. Sure he got to heal her after she did something stupid, but he was just there to be driven crazy by the sway of her hips and the likelihood that something was about to go terribly wrong. He was there to watch her barter a ring crafted for a blood mage for a tiny ebony cat and hope that maybe just this once the Maker was watching. 

Regardless of whether or not the Maker was watching, Anders’ hopes were plainly never at the top of his to-do lists. Possibly, they were relegated to quite near the bottom.

* * * * * * * * * 

“Anders!” Hawke’s voice was a little shrill at the door to the clinic. He’d locked that damn door, he knew he had, but still she was there standing in her leathers, hood drawn down over her eyebrows, lockpicks in hand. She slammed the rough sawn planks closed and leaned against them, and he could see her chest (damn her perfect, maddening chest) rising and falling quickly, panicked. “Anders, I’m in deep shit.” 

He rousted himself from the nook he kept his bed in. He ran his fingers back through his hair, pushing it off his forehead, eyeing her suspiciously. “Hawke.” It could be a trick. Was probably a trick. This time it would involve some kind of sticky plant sap that caused her to turn purple in odd locations, or a suddenly appearing birthmark that looked oddly like a dragon and was it serious? He hoped it wouldn’t be anything as awful as a painful but plainly not fatal sting of a jellyfish on the coast that she needed him to piss on to make better. 

Not that he would do that. It was a wives-tale. Nearly boiling water poured over the stings quieted the poisoned barbs and his magic did the rest. Maker, this woman. Pissing on her foot? Really? That was the clumsiest attempt she’d ever made to get him to take down his pants. Truly deeply embarrassing. Isabela’s idea, he was almost sure, and only essayed because Hawke was drunk, but still. Just awful.

“Anders. I… It’s not… I’m in trouble.” 

“I’m shocked. So, what is it this time? You have a fever that can’t be denied? An itch you need scratched?” He folded his arms. It was humiliating, the way she teased him. She didn’t actually want him. She only wanted what he refused to allow her. 

“No! Maker, I am in serious trouble.” Her hands raised and pushed her hood back, and her eyes met his wet and wide with fear. It took a moment for him to digest the expression and then see what she was pointing at, fingers extended on either side of her head. 

Ears. Well, of course she had ears. She’d always had ears! One on each side of her head. Normal, pink, human ears. Not that he’d ever stared at her ears when she brushed her hair behind them in irritation, or pressed one against a lock as she picked it. He had never bloody noticed her ears ever. At all. 

She really was in trouble. 

Instead of the soft shells of cartilage and skin there were tall, broad triangles tufted in fur the same glossy black as her hair. He felt his eyebrows crawling up into his hairline as he stared at her. “Well that’s different.” 

“Really? Are you quite sure? I mean, I know you don’t like me much, so maybe my ears have always been this way and you’ve just never bloody noticed!” Her ears flattened against her head as she squawked at him, just like a cat tense with displeasure. 

He pressed his fingers to his mouth trying to hide the smirk that threatened to bloom there. “Oh, Hawke.” 

“Fix. It.” 

Anders cleared his throat and stepped forward, raising a hand and beckoning her closer. She stalked the four steps it took to bridge the distance, each placement of her foot careful, deliberate, her hips shifting as if there was some weight to counterbalance against. Her grace had always been pronounced. Sauntering, after all. 

But now it was feline. Leopardine even. He swallowed as she pressed her head into his hand, bucking up under it. No, damnit, he wasn’t going to bloody _pet_ her. It wasn’t okay, it wasn’t allowed. She was Hawke, and he was destined to die alone and aching thinking about her fucking adorable furry ears. 

The magic he extended felt nothing abnormal. “Hmm.” 

“What does that mean, Anders? ‘Hmm?’” 

“I don’t really… There’s nothing…” He cleared his throat as his fingers started to curl into her hair and jerked his hand back. “Maybe you could tell me what happened, exactly?” 

He watched her mouth work, eyes slitted and dark. She started to unfasten the toggles of her jacket and then slipped it off her shoulders. After that the shirt underneath was loosened at the neck. She turned around, tugging the shirt over her head to expose the lithe line of her back and… 

Oh Maker, save him. 

The hair at the nape of her neck tapered to a point that should have disappeared. Should have. Two days ago? It did. Now though… the point continued in a dark stripe of black fur down her spine between her shoulder blades. Just below the flare of her waist the stripe of fur widened and as he watched she wriggled her pants down to the top of the crack of her ass. There, he could see the dark diamond of silky hair and the tail that emerged from the middle of it. 

She had a tail. His fingers were trailing into the velvet fur over the small of her back before he realized he’d moved at all, and it was heaven. Soft as down, silky, dark, just thick enough for his fingers to get lost in. He watched, mesmerized by the way her spine arched as he trailed his hand down to the base of her tail and the ridiculous length flicked up and then lashed side to side as he jerked back. 

His laughter was more than a little hysterical. “Hawke, you have a tail.” 

She punched him right in the center of his chest, hard enough to knock him down, and he could only stare as she scampered out of the clinic and into the shadows of Darktown. Hawke had a tail. She had feline ears and a tail and he had laughed at her. Anders shifted his smalls, releasing the pressure over the erection he would never admit to having. 

Hawke had fur. Furry ears. A tail. And he had failed to help her. He sighed and pulled himself together to try to find her.

* * * * * * * * * 

The Hawke estate was quiet and empty in the small hours of the morning. Anders wasn’t eager to wake the servants, or Maker forbid her mother, to ask if Hawke had arrived home, hysterical and looking a bit more like a cat than normal. He watched the windows of the house for a time, trying to discern if anyone was awake in the upper floors, and when no light or movement was evident he decided she hadn’t come here. 

Well, then the Hanged Man would make sense, he supposed. The trip to Lowtown was quiet and when he reached the tavern it was populated by a few dead-drunks on the floor. Anders figured he might see a few of them soon. He remained unconvinced that the clap wasn’t occasionally contracted from the floor of the Hanged Man. He shuddered and took the steps to Varric’s suite. 

The door was closed and dark, and he waited outside for a while, listening for voices, but apparently the dwarf was sleeping the undisturbed sleep of a man blissfully unaware that their leader was now part cat. 

Where else? She could be simply wandering the streets, looking for a fight. He scrubbed his hands over his face and banished any possible thoughts about cats and alleys that cropped up. She’d come to him for help, obviously this was a magic problem, so… Merrill? He grimaced and angled toward the alienage. 

It was unlikely Merrill would have any better answers than he did. There hadn’t been any detectable magic. Whatever had happened was not an ongoing spell. It was not being maintained like a curse or a hex. It was a transformation that maybe could be reversed if they knew the circumstances of the initial change, but Maker, it was only a partial change, and Hawke wasn’t a mage, and his fingers twitched as he thought about the soft fur on the back of her neck and no. No, Anders. Nope. Knock it off. 

As he rounded the corner to the alienage stairs he heard a soft snuffling, a clatter, and then stillness. He glanced down one of the alleys adjacent and there she was, hunched over, hood pulled low, arms folded and pretending that she was just loitering for fun. 

“Hawke?” 

“Merrill got out her ball of string. She tried to get me to chase it.” 

Of course she had. That was almost as bad as trying to pet her. Well, maybe worse. Anders was constantly having to master his desire to touch Hawke anyway. Having velvet-soft ears just made everything profoundly confusing. “And did you? Chase it? I imagine that would have made her very happy.” 

“Yes, I chased it and scampered and then she tried to pet my soft belly and I bit the shit out of her and ran.”

Anders feels the world tilt a little. “You have a soft bell--” He cleared his throat aggressively. “Rather, you have grown… uh… fur on your abdomen as well?” 

“Maker, Anders, I was kidding.” But there was something tense and defensive lingering in her posture. “About the scampering.” She turned to look at him finally, and he caught the flash of her eyes in the shadow of her hood, gathering and reflecting light. Normal eyes still, except for that, no slitted pupils or changed shape. 

“I’m sorry I laughed at the clinic.” He shifted under her continued glare. “Really, Hawke. I want to help. It was just a shock.” 

She sniffed softly and slunk toward him. “And here I thought you liked cats.” She gave him a sly upward glance as she moved past him. “I wouldn’t bite you if you rubbed my belly.” Her lips twitched as she noticed his widened eyes and he was left to trail helplessly after her. 

The trick was to not look too intently at her backside. She had hidden her tail again, tucked down one of her trouser legs he assumed. Or maybe coiled around her hips? The cut of her trousers and the length of her jacket made it difficult and Maker save him, he was not staring trying to figure out where her bloody tail was! He coughed and said, “So, you didn’t tell me what happened.” 

“I woke up just after sundown like this.” 

“That was a bit of a lie-in.” 

“Cats sleep a lot.” Her grumble was adorable, a throaty little chirrup at the end. Damn it. 

“And before you went to bed? Did you fight any blood mages or get bitten by any werebeasts?” He pulled abreast her so he would stop watching her swaying hips, stop thinking about whether or not she had been telling the truth about the fur on her belly. Unfortunately this allowed him to lean and peek inside her hood and see the irritated flick of one of her ears. 

“No. None of that. The only thing I did the past week that had anything to do with magic was take you down to the Black Emporium, and that was almost as boring as the Lowtown Bazaar.” They were climbing the steps back toward Hightown now. 

“Didn’t you buy something there? A little… cat carving?” 

She froze, an unhappy mewl in her throat and then started up the steps two at a time. 

“Hawke? Hawke, come on. If I’m going to help you have to tell me. Did you drop it or break it or…?” That might have triggered some kind of spell bound to the ebony figurine, and seeing as it came from the Black Emporium is was _highly_ likely that it was the cause of the trouble. 

He caught back up with her at the doorway of her mansion and she glared up at him. “I have it. Upstairs in my room. I…” His hand settled onto her shoulder and squeezed gently. 

“It’s fine. We’ll look at it, see if I can find the trigger. Hopefully we can put you back to rights before anyone else knows.” He attempted to be as soothing as possible, but he had to pull his hand away when she tried to nuzzle her cheek into it. 

“Well, Merrill saw me so everyone will know before too long.” She opened the door and led him in. “I’ll be lucky to make it through the day without Isabela and Varric publishing a whole sordid serial about… being in bloody heat or something equally awful.” 

“Maker’s balls, Hawke.” Anders sounded strangled as he followed her up the stairs. 

“What? You know as well as I do that is exactly where this is going!” She stalked into her room and violently shucked out of her coat and threw it into the chair next to the door. He followed her in, trying not to look at her ears, trying not to notice the flush in her cheeks as she stammered, “Not going into heat. Just them writing about it. Andraste’s tits this is humiliating.” She dropped onto the bed, head in her hands, ears drooping of all the ridiculous things. 

“Hawke, come on. You’re fine. We’ll figure this out.” He hovered in the doorway, not wanting to be in this room, alone with her. He certainly wasn’t going to watch her pout like a sad kitten. “Where’s the little statue thing?” 

She waved vaguely to the nightstand and he saw it, nestled in a small box, the hinged lid open. Next to it was folded scrap of parchment with his name on it. His gaze darted between the parchment and the cat figure, feeling a tightening in his abdomen, painful in its sweetness. She had plainly intended it as a gift, for him. He reached out to press his fingertips over his name on the note. How could even her handwriting be reckless, teasing, sweet?

“Anders?” Her tone was tentative and a little sullen and he realized he’d been still and silent for a long moment. 

“Hmm?” He was blushing and couldn’t turn toward her. 

“I need to change. The tail in the trousers… it’s driving me mad.” 

“Sure. I’ll just stay here and… examine this.” He saw her rifle through a drawer and then step behind the screen in the corner, only letting himself glance from the corner of his eye before returning his attention to the statue. 

It was magical, enchanted with a few different energies he’d never thought to combine. The Warden Commander had been a shapeshifter, something he’d never managed to get a handle on himself when she tried to teach him, but he recognized the resonance of it, along with spirit and creation magic. There was also something wild, and he was sure the carving was Dalish. Maybe Merrill would have been the one to help after all. But there was something pulling from the Fade, a lick of lyrium and dreamstuff that Justice could hear ringing in the little statue, and Anders rubbed at his forehead for a long moment. Dalish? Older? Somniari and Arlathan? He shuddered and then yelped as Hawke’s hand fell on his arm. 

“Maker, Anders!” She’d jumped back and her ears were slightly flattened and her tail… Oh her tail was puffed up like a bottle brush from startlement where it poked out from beneath the knee-length house robe she’d pulled on. It was hard to swallow past the knot in his throat. 

“Sorry. I…” He shook his head, jerking his eyes back to her face, looking at the hurt and the worry there. She looked down, twisting her hands in front of her. “Hawke?” 

“So, the statue thing. What’s that all about?” She wet her lips and darted a glance up at him before moving to the bed and sitting down, legs curled up next to her and tail brushing in slow undulations along her calf. 

He was going to the void, straight to it. He’d all but stopped believing in the Maker, the Chantry, the teachings of Andraste, but the void? That he still had room for in his existential ramblings. And his desire to run that tail through his fingers, let his hand trace the edge of her furry ears, that desire was driving him straight to the blackest pit of it. 

“It… well it’s definitely magical.” He frowned hard at his hands and then at her. “If you’re going to drag me to the Black Emporium you could _ask_ about things before you buy them on impulse.” 

She scowled at him. “Well that would ruin the surprise. It was for you.” 

“And wouldn’t that have been fantastic, me turned into a cat. Sparklepaws, they’d call me. I could heal for fishheads and work toward the liberation of all mages too long denied the right to give me tummy rubs!” He folded his arms and looked at the note, denying his need to ease his curiosity. What had she written to him in there? 

“You’re impossible.” She sounded near tears all of a sudden and he watched her tail lashing on the bed next to her. 

“You still haven’t told me what happened with the statue. Did you drop it or was there a rune on it you touched? Bleed on it? Lick it?” 

She sputtered. “Why in the Maker’s name would I lick it?” 

“Why in the Maker’s name did you buy it for me at all? I have no idea what goes on in that head of yours, Hawke! Maybe you lick every present you’ve ever bought for anyone! It would make about as much sense as anything else.” He wasn’t sure why he was so angry, except for how she always made him feel like his skin was too tight, as if all the impossible things she made him want couldn’t be bounded by just his person. And now there was one more impossible thing he would have to think about, and never would he sleep again without dreaming of nuzzling along the back of her perked, fuzzy ear. 

She recoiled as if he’d slapped her and her voice was a defeated monotone. “I thought you’d like it. You talk about Pounce. I wished I could give you a real one if the refugees wouldn’t eat it. I just wanted to give you something you actually wanted for once, since you don’t want…” She trailed off to a whisper as he stared at her, lips parted in surprise. 

“Hawke…” He wet his lips and shook his head, trying to master the hoarseness in his tone. He pushed hard against his sudden certainty that the word she failed to speak at the end of that sentence was _me_. She thought he didn’t want her? Well, he shouldn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. He fisted a hand in his hair, staring wildly, unfocused into the space between them. “Were you holding it? Thinking about… that? What you just said, thinking about me, and giving me something I wanted, and holding it?” 

He wasn’t focused on her, couldn’t bear to look at her, but he could see the shape of her head nodding, her giant ears flicking attentively, canted towards him. She let out a sudden, sharp laugh. “Funny, isn’t it? I couldn’t get that quite right. If I were an actual cat you’d probably have me tucked inside your shirt by now. Instead I’m… a… well I’m a freak, aren’t I? How do we fix it?” 

There were too many thoughts for Anders to wrangle them all at once. He shook his head slowly back and forth. She was practically writhing with embarrassment at her situation, he was possibly the worst man to ever live for finding her situation so… affecting. To hear that she was afflicted with ears and a tail because she wanted to give him a cat while believing that she was undesirable to him on a good day and now was actively repulsive? It was… Maker, it was bloody _unjust_. 

Anders crouched down, next to the bed, looking up into her face. “Hawke, listen to me. You are not a freak. You… are maddeningly adorable every damn day of your life.” He reached up slowly, cautiously, exactly like he would reach out to a strange cat, pausing so she could bridge the rest of the distance, and she did, butting her head into his hand, rubbing against it so that the warmth of her ear, thin, sensitive skin and the softest fur, folded against his palm. “Maker, forgive me.” Now he definitely sounded pained, dignity rapidly fleeing, as he curled his fingers behind the base of her ear, scritching gently with the pads of his fingers and watching her eyes roll back and close. 

“Aaah… A-anders.” The sound that escaped her was a low, throaty chirrup again, purring, deep instead of plaintive. He watched her face as his fingers trailed along the base of her neck where the soft fur thinned to a stripe and then back up the curve of her ear to the tip where he ran his thumb against the soft brush of the fur that tufted there. The pleasure in her face bordered on obscene, and that erection he had never thought to acknowledge was back, making him shift in his crouch. 

“You like that, sweetheart?” He found himself knocked backward onto his ass when she slithered off the bed into his lap, butting her head under his chin and rubbing one of her ears against the line of his jaw. “Maker, Hawke!” One of his hands followed the stripe of fur from her neck down the back of her robe between her shoulderblades and he could feel the rumble in her chest of a true purr. 

“Sorry,” she murmured as she tilted her head and rubbed against his throat, not sounding the least bit sorry at all. “I just… it feels so… weird! Good. So good. And weird.” 

“I would imagine so.” His hand traveled back up to her head, scritching at the base of the ear that was not currently being rubbed under his chin, the bristles of his scruff catching in the soft velvet of her fur (Hawke’s fur!). He knew he should stop, that this had to stop, that no matter how much he wanted to have her she wouldn’t be his, but as long as it was just this, hands on fur, clothes on, it was okay. They would fix the the problem soon and then they’d go back to normal. Except he’d know now that she did want him, desperately it seemed, and he… he thought he might die if he never got to touch her skin again.

“D-don’t stop.” She mewled as both his hands pinched gently at the base of her ears at the same time and he felt her suddenly rutting against his thigh where she straddled it. “Please, love. Don’t stop.” As he watched her face he was lost. This was it. She had won. She ground harder onto his leg and he pressed up against her, aching inside his smalls as his hands never stopped working the soft, tender cup at the base of her ears, except to occasionally trail his fingers to the tips and then back down. 

“Hawke, are you going to…?” That question was answered as she suddenly arched, her tail (Hawke’s tail!) going from thrashing to rigid as all her vertebrae tensed and she cried out, jerking her hips against his leg while she chased his hands for harder pets. The pressure of her damp heat against his leg and the rigidity of her spine collapsed simultaneously and suddenly he had a double armful of boneless, liquid Hawke, her warm breath against his throat and one of her ears twitching as his hair trailed over the tip. 

His eyes were unfocused as he held her close, one hand traveling down to finally run her tail through his fingers as he murmured soft nonsense, trying not to whine at his untended, insistent, never going to go away on its own, erection. The purring that rippled through her with each breath was too much. Would always be too much and not enough.

“So, I think I might keep the statue.” 

“Hmm?” He tried to focus on her words, what they meant. The flicking of her ear, the fluttering against the side of his neck was damn distracting. 

“Because ears. Yeah. Wow. Maybe not full-time, but… yeah.” The rough tip of her tongue scraped at the base of his throat and Anders moaned. 

“Maybe we should focus on getting you sorted, first, sweetheart.” His hand moved to her hair, fingers petting absently, completely outside his control. If he’d ever had any real control when it came to her, anyway. 

“Mmmm.” The purr coiled hot in his groin, sending a throb through him. “Maybe we could sort you first.” When she pushed one of his hands inside her robe he found that she had been serious. She would let him pet her soft, warm, furry belly.

**Author's Note:**

> So, first outing for a crack prompt. Just needed something silly to work on for a few hours. Not sure how Anders-y Anders turned out. :)


End file.
